Agatha Christie’s Marple: Murder is Easy (2009)

Well the first in this new series of Golden Age detective fiction gave us our first view of Julia McKenzie as Miss Marple but she was kept rather in the background. This adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Marple: Murder is Easy (2009) keeps the character front and centre, offering us a better chance to evaluate the performance. The experience here is somewhat like watching Doctor Who, a character played by many actors over the years. This was always faintly disconcerting because, as each regeneration came, we got major shifts in age and attitude. Miss Marple, on the other hand, must always be reasonably old although even this was slightly bent out of shape by Angela Lansbury in The Mirror Crack’d (1980). The perennial problem of how to portray her lies in understanding her methodology. Once people huddle together into villages, they get sucked into the communal life. One of the most consistent characters is the gossip. This person is usually female and she prides herself on being able to ferret out who’s doing what to whom and why just by sitting in small groups and listening. In many communities where privacy is more highly valued, village gossips are rather disliked and, in some cases, feared.

Hence, when it comes to presenting a gossip on the screen as the heroine of a long-running series, the temptation is always to make her more likeable. Yet to defang her is to reduce her capacity for investigation. As drawn by Agatha Christie, this is a woman of intelligence who has observed life. She’s usually full of anecdotes about what the butcher did with his thumb when weighing the meat, and how many others whom she has known engaged in different types of dishonesty. She can be a little fierce sometimes. And herein lies the problem with Julia McKenzie. I think she’s altogether to pallid. Yes, you have the sense she’s intelligent, but there’s a lack of steel in her. This is a more passive Miss Marple, lacking any kind of quirkiness or eccentricity. She’s not even bumbling. The very least she could do is drop her ball of wool while knitting except we’re yet to see her knit. How is she supposed to eavesdrop on people in conversations if she can’t disappear into the background by appearing to concentrate on knit one, pearl one? If she’s supposed to be able to wangle information out of people, she should be more quickly able to blend into a conversation. In the first two episodes, there are too many silences and moments of slight awkwardness as she meets and talks with new people. I’m not convinced this is a good version of Miss Marple. I still prefer Joan Hickson with Margaret Rutherford a close second.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Julia McKenzie making short work of the mystery

As originally written, this is not a Miss Marple mystery. It features a free-standing Luke Fitzwilliam (Benedict Cumberbatch) who’s returned from distant parts of the Empire where he was a police officer. After a casual meeting with a woman on the train, he’s the one who goes to the archetypal village to unmask the killer and fall in love. It’s one of these slightly wishy-washy stories in which mystery and romance go hand-in-hand through a serial killer case in a class-ridden village where there’s a faintly supernatural element in play — the local Lord is into sacrificing hens in pagan rituals. What we are presented with here is not simply a reworking of the story to introduce Miss Marple, but a wholesale revision of the story. This not only removes some characters and introduces new ones, but it also completely changes the motive for the murders — it even changes some of murder methods, e.g. from a hit-and-run car accident to pushing the victim down a long escalator on the London Underground.

I need to be clear on the basis for this review. I’m simply noting that this is nothing like the Christie original but judging the episode as presented on the screen. The first problem is in the number of men on display. If this is supposed to be just after the Second World War, most villages were predominantly female. Local land owners, being mostly Conservative in outlook and patriotic by disposition, had gone off the war. Many had failed to return. There were also not enough children in view. Babies were booming at this time as those men who had either avoided the call to duty or had managed to avoid death set out to repopulate the land. This version has Miss Marple, Luke Fitzwilliam and the local PC Terence Reed (Russell Tovey) combine to investigate. The presence of the PC gives a veneer of official approval for the investigation but, as written, there’s no consistency in the Constable who veers violently between being almost completely dim to being able to attribute a quote to Edmund Burke. As to the rest of the cast, it was pleasing in a good way to see Sylvia Syms and Tim Brooke-Taylor — I always fear old “friends” have died. Shirley Henderson does well as a younger version of Honoria Waynflete. Everyone else lurks in the background or keels over dead with the customary style. I was very surprised at the darkness of the motive for all the murders. It’s certainly not something that Agatha Christie would ever have introduced. I feel those adapting an old book for a modern audience have an obligation to keep motives consistent with the morality of the times shown. Although the biblical disposition of the child was not unreasonable, I’m not convinced the concealment of this set of circumstances would have led to so many deaths. In the original, the murderer was less than sane. The murderer in this version seems to have killed so many out of an excess of caution — something I find less than credible. So, overall, I find Agatha Christie’s Marple: Murder is Easy disappointing.